gamification: "mistaking points for the point"

One way to improve your language is by increasing your vocabulary by playing word games. This is about gamification in learning - and gamification is everywhere, although we do need to be careful how we use these techniques and perhaps, for example, we need to look at both the good and the bad about duolingo - and the alternatives.

Recently on BBC radio, we heard about the usefulness or otherwise of fun and games - and one of the guests was C Thi Nguyen, who has the provocative website Objectionable where he says: I write about trust, art, games, and communities. I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.

He talked about his latest book - and the Guardian gives a review of The Score by C Thi Nguyen – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life and, from Duolingo to GDP, how an obsession with keeping score can subtly undermine human flourishing:

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

Philosopher C Thi Nguyen’s new book tackles precisely this kind of perverse behaviour. He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don’t want. “Value capture”, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric – in some sense it supplants your original goal – until it has “redefined your core sense of what’s important”.

This is from a review of The Score by C. Thi Nguyen in the TLS:

Games and metrics are cousins of a sort. They both give us targets to pursue, often in the form of numerical scores. In the game of football, we want goals. In the metric of Fitbit, we want steps. But for reasons that C. Thi Nguyen lays out with remarkable passion in The Score, games and metrics are not the same. As the author explains, with games, the targets we strive for matter only while we are playing. Their real value is in providing a window for us to exercise our creative agency. But with metrics, we are given targets that will stay with us and divert our attention from what we really want. Nguyen’s go-to example of a metric is the fitness tracker. The user starts with a desire to get fit, but if the device only counts steps, not fitness per se, then steps will soon be all the user cares about.

In the contest between games and metrics, Nguyen comes down firmly on one side: games good, metrics bad. He insists that his view is not as black-and-white as this – “I’m not saying that games are always good and metrics are always bad” – but the truth is that games are the love of his life. Just look at how he writes about them. Like a page out of Roget’s [thesaurus], the good in games seems endless: they bring joy, refuge, freedom, loveliness, grace, softness, absorption and fizz; they are cool, delicious, pleasurable, explosive, deep, joyful, magical, beautiful, fascinating, whimsical, elegant, radiant, thrilling, ecstatic, gorgeous, purified, interesting, satisfying, real, true, valuable, delightful, pleasing, exploratory, glorious, inventive, hypnotic, arresting, subtle, tasty, raucous, wild, intense, creative, open-minded and fun. And metrics? Well, they are miserable, awful, rigid, inflexible, grinding, closed-minded, soul-deadening, insensitive and stupid; they are moral bleach, they get under the skin, they drain the life out of everything. You get the idea.

A game in Nguyen’s book is a broad category. He includes everything from “fly-fishing, rock climbing, Portal, The Mind, basketball, The Legend of Zelda, Starcraft II, chess” to cooking, yo-yoing and after-dinner charades. What unites them as games? Nguyen’s answer begins with the philosopher Bernard Suits’s definition from his classic work The Grasshopper: Games, life, and utopia (1978):

So, here's a helpful review of "The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia" (1978) by Bernard Suits.

And here's a look at the book Trust in Numbers mentioned by Nguyen, which looks at how life is dominated by 'points' - and the allure of quantitative and standardized measures.

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